The poem 'Iceland' reflects the journey MacNeice took with W. H. Auden in the summer of 1936, while 'Bagpipe Music' was inspired by a journey to the Hebrides in 1937 and was later described by MacNeice as 'a satirical elegy for the Gaelic districts of Scotland and indeed for all traditional culture'.
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The Earth Compels is dedicated "To NANCY" (Nancy Coldstream, later Nancy Spender, with whom Louis MacNeice had an affair during 1937-38), and has an epigraph from a Greek tragedy MacNeice was then translating, Euripides' Hippolytus.
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In early 1937 MacNeice began an affair with Nancy Coldstream (later Nancy Spender), and Nancy provided the inspiration for 'Leaving Barra' (as well as for two sections of MacNeice's next volume of poetry, Autumn Journal).
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The final poem in the collection, Epilogue, is subtitled 'For W. H. Auden', and reviews the Iceland trip MacNeice and Auden had taken together; the poem mentions events that had occurred while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville (marking the start of the Spanish Civil War) and the Olympic Games in Berlin.
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